New Developments in the Search for Missing Cult Followers

The plot thickens in the search for a group of online cult followers who have vanished.

Kalyn Womack

The Root
January 18, 2024

The Missouri police have dug their heels into the sudden vanishing of four adults and two children believed to be in association with an online cult member who is currently behind bars. Their latest finding, however, suggests the group went off-grid on purpose.

Berkeley Police Maj. Steve Runge told NBC it is likely the group doesn’t plan to be found given the recent bits of evidence he’s collected.“They’ve shut off their phones, shut off their social media, shut off everything. We’ve even sent them money via a cash app and they haven’t collected it. They’re just gone,” Runge said via NBC.

After the group vanished in August, police discovered they were followers of Rashad Jamal White, an online conspiracy theorist who calls himself a god, supports polygamy, teaches mythology and basically tries to convince Black people that they are of another multiverse. Their family members told local St. Louis reporters they often found the group members meditating and chanting outside their homes.

So far, this is the biggest lead toward an explanation as to why the group up and left civilization. However, the report says this wasn’t the first Rashad Jamal White-worshipper who did something sideways like this.

Earlier this month, Yasmine Hider was hit with a 35-year prison sentence for her role in the fatal shooting of 22-year-old Adam Simjee of Apopka, Florida, in the Talladega National Forest in Alabama. She and her accomplice, Krystal Pinkins, had been living off the grid in the forest when they tried to rob Simjee and his girlfriend.

In social media postings seen by NBC News, Hider repeatedly mentioned Jamal.
Pinkins, who received a life sentence for the Simjee killing, was also a follower of Jamal, according to various published reports.

The whole connecting to the cosmos, looking for portals to Africa in the Grand Canyon and hyperspiritual teachings would seemingly encourage a person to disconnect. However, their guru can’t be of much guidance serving an 18-year sentence in prison on child molestation charges.

Actually, he denied knowing these people at all.

“I am pretty sure I have never met these people. I get on my phone and I give a lecture. I go live, and then I get off the phone. I do not know the people that are in my live(stream). It’s too many people,” he said in a phone interview with St. Louis Post-Dispatch from Georgia prison.

He also denied being a cult leader but insisted he was an educator on metaphysics, molecular biology, Black history - and so on and so forth. With that being said, he then argued that the police “put a target on his back” upon the group’s disappearance.

Berkeley Police Maj. Runge could not be reached for comment on next steps in the investigation.

https://www.theroot.com/new-developments-in-the-search-for-missing-cult-followe-1851173720

‘Stolen Youth,’ Hulu’s Sarah Lawrence Sex Cult Doc, Stands Apart From the Worst of True Crime

Allegra Frank

The Daily Beast

February 17, 2023

"The case of the Sarah Lawrence College cult is peak true-crime fodder, to the point where it’s gotten two separate docuseries in the past five months. The version of the story as told by Peacock’s salacious September release Sex, Lies, and the College Cult was especially tantalizing. A bunch of college co-eds fall under a dad’s spell, leading them to move into a one-bedroom apartment with him, have sex with each other, and endure emotional and physical abuse for years.

That doc, however, was a tacky reduction of this specific story. Larry Ray, who was recently sentenced to 60 years in prison for sex trafficking, conspiracy, and 13 other charges, preyed upon a specific set of people: twentysomethings dealing with mental health issues; men and women of color butting up against societal pressures of being underprivileged; kids still figuring out their sexuality. Each of the college kids who Ray blackmailed, abused, and brainwashed was particularly susceptible to his manipulation.

Hulu’s new series Stolen Youth: Inside the Cult of Sarah Lawrence is the first version of this lurid yet intoxicating crime story that recognizes this. And that’s most apparent in how Stolen Youth gives the most heartbreaking victims of Ray a human story—allowing them to speak up, on camera, free of their tormentor’s presence and influence.

In the initial reporting on the Larry Ray/Sarah Lawrence case, Felicia Rosario emerged as the most heart-wrenching example of Ray’s psychological damage. In 2010, 27-year-old med school grad Rosario met Ray through her college-age brother Santos; Santos was dating Ray’s daughter Talia when he entered the toxic clique. Ray and Felicia quickly struck up a powerful, emotionally wrought relationship, leading to Felicia ditching her residency program in L.A. to move in with Ray, her brother, and the other kids; Felicia and Santos’ sister Yalitza had also joined by this point.

Felicia’s story stood out among the others for both how much and how long she endured Ray’s abuse. Perhaps it was that she seemingly sacrificed the most by giving up on her dreams to become a psychiatrist that made her such a compelling figure—or perhaps it was the irony that a budding psychiatrist could so swiftly fall for a master manipulator like Ray. Either way, footage of Felicia is the most disturbing to watch of all the tape that Ray recorded over the near-decade he held his captives as psychological prisoners. (Why people like Ray or other recently nabbed cult leader Keith Raniere document their abuses so thoroughly, I’ll never understand.)

For years, Ray taped Felicia screaming on the floor in a clear psychic break; begging for forgiveness for things she did not do; claiming that she had been poisoned, simply because Ray told her she was; and having incessant panic attacks. This footage is all over Stolen Youth, just as it was in Sex, Lies, and the College Cult as well as other reports of the case. Felicia was seen as a symbol of what a cult can do to a promising young woman: render her unstable, leave her disheveled, and make her a shell of her former self.

What director Zach Heinzerling’s Stolen Youth does differently, however, is that it tells the story not from the perspective of a ravenous observer, but from nearly all of Ray’s young victims, letting them recount their own stories of succumbing to such a strange man’s beliefs. The shock of hearing about what Ray made the kids do—sleeping on the floor of a one-bedroom apartment, telling him about every negative thought they’d ever had, letting him convince them that their family members were to blame—is mitigated by the sadness of hearing them tell it. There’s an allowance for empathy here that even the best journalism hasn’t granted the victims; their first-person accounts allow us to directly connect with and understand their unique circumstances.

“There’s an allowance for empathy here that even the best journalism hasn’t granted the victims; their first-person accounts allow us to directly connect with and understand their unique circumstances.”

That Heinzerling was able to interview Felicia, in particular, is a huge win. From a reporting perspective, it’s of course crucial to get as many sides of the story as possible. But Stolen Youth grants Felicia an arc that any docuseries would be lucky to secure. We first meet her shortly after Ray has been arrested, where she and fellow victim Isabella Pollok are living in the cocoon-like New Jersey home Ray ultimately sequestered them in. Felicia tells the camera, boldly, that Ray is innocent—anyone who says otherwise is working for the government, or has been secretly poisoning her, or has been hired by her parents to ruin her life.

The most unsettling moment is when Felicia explains that she and Ray are “married”—common-law marriage, she says, because they’ve been living together and in love for so long. “I’m his honey-bunny lady,” she explains, “and he’s my honey-bunny man.” This comes moments after she shows off a well-organized drawer of countless pills and shelves of rations. At that point, it seems doubtful that a woman so deeply influenced by Ray’s paranoid worldview could ever make her way out of it, even with Ray out of the picture.

But Felicia continues to participate in interviews with Heinzerling in the months to come. Next time we see her, she and Isabella have parted ways and moved out of the house. Her legal counsel told her it would be the right move, Felicia says, as did her therapist. That latter detail feels like a quiet win, especially when we see how much healthier she already looks from being out of the house. Felicia’s hair is untangled, her face is fuller, and she’s seemingly inching closer to rational thought.

To see her removed from those subpoenaed videos where she’s at her most ravaged is a heartening, gracious triumph for the viewer and the show. The entirety of its third hour is devoted to Felicia’s slow, steady path toward forgiveness—of herself and, most touchingly, her family. At first, Felicia can’t fully dismiss Ray as her abuser, telling us that she believes much of what has been said about him is a lie. How could he have required one of her roommates to do sex work under her nose? How could he have lied about her parents cooperating with the police to destroy her?

In the film’s final act, however, Felicia has found both reality and grace. She was a victim, she has trauma, and she has a life to rebuild; through therapy, she has reconnected with herself. It’s beautiful to watch the physical and emotional change that she has undergone from when we first met her at the start of the series, especially through such an intimate lens."

[continue reading]

https://www.thedailybeast.com/why-hulus-sarah-lawrence-sex-cult-doc-stolen-youth-stands-out 

 

George Orwell, 1984

“Oceanic society rests ultimately on the belief that Big Brother is omnipotent and that the Party is infallible. 

But since in reality Big Brother is not omnipotent and the party is not infallible, there is need for an unwearying, moment-to-moment flexibility in the treatment of facts. 

The keyword here is BLACKWHITE. 

Like so many Newspeak words, this word has two mutually contradictory meanings. 

Applied to an opponent, it means the habit of impudently claiming that black is white, in contradiction of the plain facts. 

Applied to a Party member, it means a loyal willingness to say that black is white when Party discipline demands this. 

But it means also the ability to BELIEVE that black is white, and more, to KNOW that black is white, and to forget that one has ever believed the contrary.”

― George Orwell, 1984

CultNEWS101 Articles: 2/26-27/2022

Stanford Prison Experiment, Milgram Experiment, Obedience, Greg Locke

Weird History: The Stanford Prison Experiment Was One of the Most Disturbing Studies Ever

"In 1971, professor Philip Zimbardo put together one of the most intriguing and famous psychology experiments ever: the Stanford Prison Experiment, designed to study the effects of incarceration on prisoners and guards. Using an advertisement to recruit college-aged men in the area for a one-of-a-kind study, Zimbardo and his team hoped to remove volunteers predisposed to mental illness and those with existing records from their experiment. Nonetheless, the Stanford Prison Experiment brought out those qualities in its participants."

The Milgram Experiment 1962 Full Documentary

""The Milgram experiment(s) on obedience to authority figures was a series of social psychology experiments conducted by Yale University psychologist Stanley Milgram. They measured the willingness of study participants, men in the age range of 20 to 50 from a diverse range of occupations with varying levels of education, to obey an authority figure who instructed them to perform acts conflicting with their personal conscience. Participants were led to believe that they were assisting an unrelated experiment, in which they had to administer electric shocks to a "learner". These fake electric shocks gradually increased to levels that would have been fatal had they been real.

The experiment found, unexpectedly, that a very high proportion of subjects would fully obey the instructions, albeit reluctantly. Milgram first described his research in a 1963 article in the Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology and later discussed his findings in greater depth in his 1974 book, Obedience to Authority: An Experimental View."

RNS: Tennessee preacher Greg Locke says demons told him names of witches in his church

Controversial Tennessee preacher Greg Locke has turned from claims of election fraud to conversations with demons.

" ... In recent years Locke has used his sermons to attack LGBTQ people, accuse Democratic politicians of child abuse, spread claims about election fraud, denounce vaccines and claim that the COVID-19 pandemic is a hoax. During Sunday's sermon, he blamed witchcraft for an outbreak of illness in the church."

" .... Two of the witches were in his wife's Bible study, '' said Locke, who warned the alleged witches not to make a move during his sermon. He then retold the New Testament story of Jesus casting a demon out of a man and into a herd of pigs, turning it into an extended monologue about witches in the church."

News, Education, Intervention, Recovery

CultEducationEvents.com

CultMediation.com   

Intervention101.com to help families and friends understand and effectively respond to the complexity of a loved one's cult involvement.

CultRecovery101.com assists group members and their families make the sometimes difficult transition from coercion to renewed individual choice.

CultNEWS101.com news, links, resources.

Facebook

Flipboard

Twitter

Instagram

Cults101.org resources about cults, cultic groups, abusive relationships, movements, religions, political organizations and related topics.

Selection of articles for CultNEWS101 does not mean that Patrick Ryan or Joseph Kelly agree with the content. We provide information from many points of view in order to promote dialogue.

Please forward articles that you think we should add to cultintervention@gmail.com.

ICSA Conversations: Brainwashing: Scientific Concept or Mere Label

October 27, 2017. 7:00 - 9:00 pm

Church of St. Paul and St. Andrew (United Methodist)

263 W. 86th St.

New York, NY

Benjamin Zablocki, PhD, Professor of Sociology emeritus and former Chair of the Department of Sociology at Rutgers University, has been studying cults, communes, and charisma for more than 50 years. He is the author of The Joyful Community (1971) and Alienation and Charisma (1980), as well as numerous articles on these topics. He is co-editor (with Thomas Robbins) of Misunderstanding Cults: Searching for Objectivity in a Controversial Field, published in 2001 by University of Toronto Press. This book attempts to find a middle ground between the theories of cult apologists and the theories of those fighting cults. He is currently writing a book developing a biopsychosocial theory of charismatic resocialization—sometimes called thought reform or brainwashing. He says about the book: “My goal is to use recent advances in neuropsychology to give the concept of brainwashing something it has never had and sorely lacks: a precise scientific definition.”

REGESTER NOW - Freehttp://www.icsahome.com/events/localevents/icsa-conversations

Nine in 10 people would electrocute others if ordered, rerun of infamous Milgram Experiment shows

The Milgram Experiment being conducted in the 1960s

Sarah Knapton, science editor
Telegraph Science
March 14, 2017

A notorious experiment in the 1960s to find out if ordinary people were prepared to inflict pain if ordered to do so by an authority figure has reached an even more sinister conclusion.

Despite the lessons of history, nine in 10 would electrocute their peers even if they were screaming in agony, simply because they were told to do so.

When the original study was conducted by American psychologist Stanley Milgram, from Yale University, only two thirds of people continued all the way up to the maximum 450-volt level.

The experiments were devised to investigate the insistence by the German Nazi Adolf Eichmann, during his war crimes trial, that he and his accomplices in the Holocaust, were “just following orders

Fifty years later, the new version of the experiment conducted in Poland has shown that human nature, if anything has got worse.

Most people say they would not inflict pain on others but are happy to do so if ordered to by an authority figure

This time, 80 participants were recruited, including women as well as men, and 90 per cent were willing to inflict the highest shock level of 450 volts to a complicit "learner" screaming in agony.

Social psychologist Dr Tomasz Grzyb, from the SWPS University of Social Sciences and Humanities in Poland, said: "Upon learning about Milgram's experiments, a vast majority of people claim that 'I would never behave in such a manner'.

"Our study has, yet again, illustrated the tremendous power of the situation the subjects are confronted with and how easily they can agree to things which they find unpleasant."

The participants, aged 18 to 69, were shown an electric generator which was demonstrated by administering a mild shock of 45 volts.

Volunteers were given a series of 10 levers to press, each appearing to send a successively higher shock to the learner - out of sight in a neighbouring room - via electrodes attached to the wrist.

In reality, no electric shocks were delivered, and, as in the original experiment, the learner was playing a role.

After pressing lever number two, "successive impulses of electricity " resulted in screams of increasing pain from the learner," the scientists wrote in the journal Social Psychological and Personality Science.

"These screams were recorded and played back at appropriate moments."

The "teachers" were told they were taking part in research on memory and learning.

Just as in Milgram's experiment, they were spurred on by prompts from the supervising scientist such as "the experiment requires that you continue", "it is absolutely essential that you continue", and "you have no other choice, you must go on".

Mercy was more apparent when the learner was a woman. In this case, the number of participants refusing to carry out the orders of the experimenter was three times higher than when the person receiving the "shocks" was a man.

Dr Grzyb concluded: "Half a century after Milgram's original research into obedience to authority, a striking majority of subjects are still willing to electrocute a helpless individual."

A recent study by St Andrew's University suggested that people were happy to inflict pain on others if they believed it was for the greater good. The researchers looked back through records of the original experiment and found that those who took part were not unhappy with their choice.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/science/2017/03/14/nine-10-people-would-electrocute-others-ordered-re-run-milgram/

Nine in 10 people would electrocute others if ordered, rerun of infamous Milgram Experiment shows

The Milgram Experiment being conducted in the 1960s

Sarah Knapton, science editor 

Telegraph Science
March 14, 2017


A notorious experiment in the 1960s to find out if ordinary people were prepared to inflict pain if ordered to do so by an authority figure has reached an even more sinister conclusion.

Despite the lessons of history, nine in 10 would electrocute their peers even if they were screaming in agony, simply because they were told to do so.

When the original study was conducted by American psychologist Stanley Milgram, from Yale University, only two thirds of people continued all the way up to the maximum 450-volt level.

The experiments were devised to investigate the insistence by the German Nazi Adolf Eichmann, during his war crimes trial, that he and his accomplices in the Holocaust, were “just following orders

Fifty years later, the new version of the experiment conducted in Poland has shown that human nature, if anything has got worse.

Most people say they would not inflict pain on others but are happy to do so if ordered to by an authority figure

This time, 80 participants were recruited, including women as well as men, and 90 per cent were willing to inflict the highest shock level of 450 volts to a complicit "learner" screaming in agony.

Social psychologist Dr Tomasz Grzyb, from the SWPS University of Social Sciences and Humanities in Poland, said: "Upon learning about Milgram's experiments, a vast majority of people claim that 'I would never behave in such a manner'.

"Our study has, yet again, illustrated the tremendous power of the situation the subjects are confronted with and how easily they can agree to things which they find unpleasant."

The participants, aged 18 to 69, were shown an electric generator which was demonstrated by administering a mild shock of 45 volts.

Volunteers were given a series of 10 levers to press, each appearing to send a successively higher shock to the learner - out of sight in a neighbouring room - via electrodes attached to the wrist.

In reality, no electric shocks were delivered, and, as in the original experiment, the learner was playing a role.

After pressing lever number two, "successive impulses of electricity " resulted in screams of increasing pain from the learner," the scientists wrote in the journal Social Psychological and Personality Science.

"These screams were recorded and played back at appropriate moments."

The "teachers" were told they were taking part in research on memory and learning.

Just as in Milgram's experiment, they were spurred on by prompts from the supervising scientist such as "the experiment requires that you continue", "it is absolutely essential that you continue", and "you have no other choice, you must go on".

Mercy was more apparent when the learner was a woman. In this case, the number of participants refusing to carry out the orders of the experimenter was three times higher than when the person receiving the "shocks" was a man.

Dr Grzyb concluded: "Half a century after Milgram's original research into obedience to authority, a striking majority of subjects are still willing to electrocute a helpless individual."

A recent study by St Andrew's University suggested that people were happy to inflict pain on others if they believed it was for the greater good. The researchers looked back through records of the original experiment and found that those who took part were not unhappy with their choice.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/science/2017/03/14/nine-10-people-would-electrocute-others-ordered-re-run-milgram/

Evil, part 4: the social dimension

Guardian

Clare Carlisle

November 5, 2012

Does contemporary society give rise to conditions more conducive to evil than in the past?

So far in this series I've considered evil as if it were an individual matter – a question of personal virtue, or the lack of it. In emphasising the relationship between sin and freedom, Christian philosophers such as Augustine seem to assume that if we look hard enough at the human condition we will gain insight into evil. This attitude implies that evil has nothing to do with history or culture – as if the fall is the only historical event that matters, at least as far as evil is concerned.

In the 20th century, a series of scientific experiments on the psychology of evil told a very different story. Among the most infamous of these are the experiments at Yale and Stanford universities conducted in the 1970s by Stanley Milgram and Philip Zimbardo. Both Milgram and Zimbardo found that, under certain conditions, well-educated and apparently ordinary university students were capable of immense cruelty. Under the instructions of an authority-figure, Milgram's students were prepared to administer painful electric shocks as a penalty for poor memory: two-thirds of them increased the voltage to lethal levels as their "subjects" cried in agony. These results demonstrated how dangerous and immoral obedience can be. In his experiment, Zimbardo created a prison environment in the psychology department at Stanford, assigning roles of guard and prisoner to his group of undergraduates. Within a few days guards were treating prisoners with such cruelty and contempt that the experiment had to be terminated early.

Reflecting on his Stanford prison experiment in 2004, Zimbardo wrote eloquently about the conditions that make good people do evil things. The prison, he suggested, is an institution set apart from normal society in which brutality can be legitimised. Wearing uniforms and sunglasses, identifying prisoners by numbers and guards by official titles and removing clocks and blocking natural light all helped to dehumanise and deindividualise the participants. In this "totally authoritarian situation", says Zimbardo, most of the guards became sadistic, while many of the prisoners "showed signs of emotional breakdown". Perhaps most interestingly, Zimbardo found that he himself, in the role of prison superintendent, rapidly underwent a transformation: "I began to talk, walk and act like a rigid institutional authority figure more concerned about the security of "my prison" than the needs of the young men entrusted to my care as a psychological researcher."

Although Zimbardo insists that "there were no lasting negative consequences of this powerful experience", his conclusions raise ethical questions about scientific experimentation itself. Does the laboratory, like the prison, provide a special kind of environment in which pain can be inflicted with approval? Do the white coats and the impersonal manner of recording results dehumanise both scientists and their subjects?

These questions point to a larger philosophical issue. Does contemporary society give rise to conditions more conducive to evil than in the past? Do science and technology, in particular, dehumanise us? Modern technology has certainly created forms of communication that allow people to remain more safely anonymous. Take the internet, for example; it's right here. In recent years the malevolent online behaviour of internet trolls and vitriolic commentators, hiding behind their pseudonyms, has become a much-discussed cultural phenomenon. Maybe it's quite natural that we have a delicious taste of freedom and power when given the opportunity to go undercover – like Stevenson's Jekyll-turned-Hyde as he runs gleefully through the night to the wrong side of town, stamping on children as he goes. But in such circumstances are we really in control? Milgram's electrocutors thought they were in control, and so did Philip Zimbardo. It turned out, of course, that they too were part of the experiment.

As usual, Plato has something to contribute to this debate. In the Republic Socrates' pupil Glaucon recounts the story of a shepherd,Gyges, who fell into the earth during an earthquake and found a ring that made him invisible. "Having made this discovery," says Glaucon, "he managed to get himself included in the party that was to report to the king, and when he arrived he seduced the queen and with her help attacked and murdered the king and seized the throne."

Plato uses this story to depict the prevailing immorality within his own Athenian society – a society which had, after all, sentenced to death its wisest and most virtuous citizen. Plato suggests that his contemporaries regard hypocrisy and deceit as the surest route to happiness, since they seek all the benefits of a reputation for virtue, or "justice", while promoting their own interest by vice, or "injustice", wherever possible. In the Republic he argues, through the voice of Socrates, that this view is not only morally wrong but misguided, since true happiness and freedom can only come from living virtuously.

The story of Gyges's ring seems to suggest that evil is a simply a fact of human nature. When anonymity releases us from responsibility for our actions, we will gladly abandon morality and harm anyone who obstructs our pursuit of what we think will make us happy. In this way, we might point to Gyges in arguing that there is nothing particularly modern about evil. On the other hand, though, Plato had to resort to a myth, and a magic ring, to illustrate the conditions under which our tendency to evil manifests itself. In our own time, technology has worked its magic, and the fantasy of invisibility has become an everyday reality.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2012/nov/05/evil-social-dimension